ANALYSIS Americans continued to celebrate the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden well into May 2 outside the White House, near the World Trade Center site in New York and elsewhere.
The operation that led to Osama's death at a compound deep in Pakistan is among the most significant operational successes for United States intelligence in the past decade.
While it is surely an emotional victory for the US and one that could have consequences both for its role in Afghanistan and for relations with Pakistan, Osama's elimination will have very little effect on al-Qaeda as a whole and the wider jihadist movement.Due to Osama's status as the most-wanted individual in the world, any communications he carried out with other known al-Qaeda operatives risked interception, and thus risked revealing his location. This forced him to be extremely careful with communications for operational security and essentially required him to give up an active role in command-and-control in order to remain alive and at large.
He reportedly used a handful of highly trusted personal couriers to maintain communication and had no telephone or Internet connection at his compound in Abbottabad (left), Pakistan. Limited as his communications network was, one of these couriers was compromised and tracked to the compound, enabling the operation against Osama.
Because of Osama's aforementioned communications limitations, since October 2001 when he fled Tora Bora after the US invasion of Afghanistan, he has been relegated to a largely symbolic and ideological role in al-Qaeda. Accordingly, he has issued audiotapes on a little more than a yearly basis, whereas before 2007 he was able to issue videotapes. The growing infrequency and decreasing quality of his recorded messages was most notable when al-Qaeda did not release a message marking the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in September 2010 but later followed up with a tape on Jan 21, 2011.
The reality of the situation is that the al-Qaeda core - the central group including leaders like Osama and Ayman al-Zawahiri - has been eclipsed by other jihadist actors on the physical battlefield, and over the past two years it has even been losing its role as an ideological leader of the jihadist struggle.
New threats
The primary threat is now posed by al-Qaeda franchise groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the latter of which may have carried out the recent attack in Marrakech, Morocco. But even these groups are under intense pressure by local government and US operations, and much of the current threat comes from grassroots and lone wolf attackers. These actors could attempt to stage an attack in the US or elsewhere in retribution for Osama's death, but they do not have the training or capabilities for high-casualty transnational attacks.
It is long considered the possibility that Osama was already dead, and in terms of his impact on terrorist operations, he effectively was. That does not mean, however, that he was not an important ideological leader or that he was not someone the US sought to capture or kill for his role in carrying out the most devastating terrorist attack in American history.
Aggressive US intelligence collection efforts have come to fruition, as killing Osama was perhaps the top symbolic goal for the CIA and all those involved in US covert operations. Indeed, President Barack Obama said during his speech May 1 that upon entering office, he had personally instructed CIA director Leon Panetta that killing the al-Qaeda leader was his top priority.
The logistical challenges of catching a single wanted individual with Osama's level of resources were substantial, and 10 years later, the US was able to accomplish the objective it set out to do in October 2001.
The bottom line is that from an operational point of view, the threat posed by al Qaeda - and the wider jihadist movement - is no different operationally after his death.
Soure - Stratfor
http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/163059
The operation that led to Osama's death at a compound deep in Pakistan is among the most significant operational successes for United States intelligence in the past decade. While it is surely an emotional victory for the US and one that could have consequences both for its role in Afghanistan and for relations with Pakistan, Osama's elimination will have very little effect on al-Qaeda as a whole and the wider jihadist movement.Due to Osama's status as the most-wanted individual in the world, any communications he carried out with other known al-Qaeda operatives risked interception, and thus risked revealing his location. This forced him to be extremely careful with communications for operational security and essentially required him to give up an active role in command-and-control in order to remain alive and at large.
Because of Osama's aforementioned communications limitations, since October 2001 when he fled Tora Bora after the US invasion of Afghanistan, he has been relegated to a largely symbolic and ideological role in al-Qaeda. Accordingly, he has issued audiotapes on a little more than a yearly basis, whereas before 2007 he was able to issue videotapes. The growing infrequency and decreasing quality of his recorded messages was most notable when al-Qaeda did not release a message marking the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in September 2010 but later followed up with a tape on Jan 21, 2011.
The reality of the situation is that the al-Qaeda core - the central group including leaders like Osama and Ayman al-Zawahiri - has been eclipsed by other jihadist actors on the physical battlefield, and over the past two years it has even been losing its role as an ideological leader of the jihadist struggle.
New threats
The primary threat is now posed by al-Qaeda franchise groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the latter of which may have carried out the recent attack in Marrakech, Morocco. But even these groups are under intense pressure by local government and US operations, and much of the current threat comes from grassroots and lone wolf attackers. These actors could attempt to stage an attack in the US or elsewhere in retribution for Osama's death, but they do not have the training or capabilities for high-casualty transnational attacks.
It is long considered the possibility that Osama was already dead, and in terms of his impact on terrorist operations, he effectively was. That does not mean, however, that he was not an important ideological leader or that he was not someone the US sought to capture or kill for his role in carrying out the most devastating terrorist attack in American history.
Aggressive US intelligence collection efforts have come to fruition, as killing Osama was perhaps the top symbolic goal for the CIA and all those involved in US covert operations. Indeed, President Barack Obama said during his speech May 1 that upon entering office, he had personally instructed CIA director Leon Panetta that killing the al-Qaeda leader was his top priority.
The logistical challenges of catching a single wanted individual with Osama's level of resources were substantial, and 10 years later, the US was able to accomplish the objective it set out to do in October 2001.
The bottom line is that from an operational point of view, the threat posed by al Qaeda - and the wider jihadist movement - is no different operationally after his death.
Soure - Stratfor
http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/163059
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